I think I rarely ever hear such nonsense - except in some of the discussions or debates here. Finally I figured out where some of the people I have debating here on this kind of topic got their ideas from - or maybe they just had the same idea - or the source is elsewhere. But seriously - re-engineering the world to make it "cruelty free" with vegan lions and the lot? This is what self-proclaimed "ecologically thinking" techno-optimists dream of when they are high on the drug of technology and science? I am glad that they did not try to make Pandora that way, but rather there are predators there - so if Pandora would be (as some people seem to think) a genetically engineered world, at least it was not engineered by "Abolitionists" !

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A biosphere without suffering is technically feasible. In principle, science can deliver a cruelty-free world that lacks the molecular signature of unpleasant experience. Not merely can a living world support human life based on genetically preprogrammed gradients of human well-being. If carried to completion, the abolitionist project entails ecosystem redesign, immunocontraception, marine nanorobots, rewriting the vertebrate genome, and harnessing the exponential growth of computational resources to manage a compassionate global ecosystem. Ultimately, it's an ethical choice whether intelligent moral agents opt to create such a world - or instead express our natural status quo bias and perpetuate the biology of suffering indefinitely.

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Know your idols: Who said "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.". (Solution: "Mahatma" Ghandi)

"Humans are storytellers. These stories then can become our reality. Only when we loose ourselves in the stories they have the power to control us. Our culture got lost in the wrong story, a story of death and defeat, of opression and control, of separation and competition. We need a new story!"

A world without predation and 'cruelty' would be such an overpopulated and horrible place to live. They have not thought this through at all, and it is not their place to make such changes. Seriously what is going on in these sicko's heads

This is what self-proclaimed "ecologically thinking" techno-optimists dream of when they are high on the drug of technology and science?

Well, no, because they're stuck in a nonsensical half-way position. There's no real point to doing what they suggest, because either we're OK with nature continuing as it is, or we're not. If we're not, why not just get rid of it entirely and rebuild the world exactly as we find most pleasing?

Well, no, because they're stuck in a nonsensical half-way position. There's no real point to doing what they suggest, because either we're OK with nature continuing as it is, or we're not. If we're not, why not just get rid of it entirely and rebuild the world exactly as we find most pleasing?

This is exactly what these people in the link I copied want - get rid of nature and create some sort of world that is as they want it - without cruelty. Though yes, they seem to want at least to take the present natural world as a base for their redesigned world - unlike you rproposal.

I need to think hard which idea is the one that is more insane...

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Know your idols: Who said "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.". (Solution: "Mahatma" Ghandi)

"Humans are storytellers. These stories then can become our reality. Only when we loose ourselves in the stories they have the power to control us. Our culture got lost in the wrong story, a story of death and defeat, of opression and control, of separation and competition. We need a new story!"

This is exactly what these people in the link I copied want - get rid of nature and create some sort of world that is as they want it - without cruelty. Though yes, they seem to want at least to take the present natural world as a base for their redesigned world - unlike you rproposal.

I need to think hard which idea is the one that is more insane...

Why keep nature around if you have the biotech to do everything it does? (As they appear to assume as part of their premise.)

Right, I'm not sure what the motivation for such a thing would be, unless the whole idea was just a crazy "what if" moment, more about could it be done than actually doing it.

The motivation is clear ans Silver Stag wrote it. They want to apply "civilized" human ideals that even "civilized" humans cannot adhere to (end of violence and cruelty, love happiness and rainbows with unicorns) to the natural world. And to get there, they basically have to dometicate, break and reassemble the natural world. Essentially they are creating a garden instead of wilderness - a garden that only holds domesticated and in this case even engineered life. I assume they are motivated by that false idea that evolution and progress has a goal and a direction toward something "more advanced" - that they have to improve the imprefection of life according to how they define that imperfection. And its not as remote as one thinks. Yesterday there was a show on TV about transhumanism and the lot - they boasted about all the things that will be possible to be done soon. So if they are true, technically this would seem just beyond grasp. I think there are certainly many people who would like to see this happening if it was possible. Thinking of all the vegans out there...

Unless of course these people do have no value for a natural world anyways but rather want to abolish it:

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Originally Posted by Clarke

Why keep nature around if you have the biotech to do everything it does? (As they appear to assume as part of their premise.)

... which just makes clear that some people just did not get any of the messages from Avatar that the natural world and the culture of indigenous peoples have a value of their own and that it is not all just about utilitarianism and efficiency.

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Know your idols: Who said "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.". (Solution: "Mahatma" Ghandi)

"Humans are storytellers. These stories then can become our reality. Only when we loose ourselves in the stories they have the power to control us. Our culture got lost in the wrong story, a story of death and defeat, of opression and control, of separation and competition. We need a new story!"

Thee are people who say all sorts of rubbish, it doesn't make it plausible. In this case, they fail to understand population control via predator/prey - prey would breed out of all control, while the predators would be in direct competition with them, rather than a mutually fluctuating population level. The majority of people who say "more advanced" in such a sense know nothing about genetics specifically because it's a fallacy that change is always directed, so I doubt that applies here - but then again, I doubt these people know anything about genetics either or they'd realise the impossibility of this - reading wikipedia does not equate to detailed knowledge.

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... which just makes clear that some people just did not get any of the messages from Avatar that the natural world and the culture of indigenous peoples have a value of their own and that it is not all just about utilitarianism and efficiency.

At the risk of misunderstanding him as I have before, I think Clarke was pointing out the flaw in your reasoning - that they want to change Earth as part of preserving it rather than simply replacing it, which doesn't actually seem to be the case, and as such, they should be given no more credence than flat-earthers or the 'zeitgeist' group.

The motivation is clear ans Silver Stag wrote it. They want to apply "civilized" human ideals that even "civilized" humans cannot adhere to (end of violence and cruelty, love happiness and rainbows with unicorns) to the natural world.

Did you notice the description of Eywa-like distributed intelligence systems? Powerful, though perhaps not completely human-level AI is apparently part of the premise.

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I assume they are motivated by that false idea that evolution and progress has a goal and a direction toward something "more advanced" - that they have to improve the imprefection of life according to how they define that imperfection.

More likely, they are entirely aware of this lack of goal - and bypass it, by replacing the randomly evolved lifeforms with life that is, objectively, designed to survive better than that which is currently existing.

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Yesterday there was a show on TV about transhumanism and the lot - they boasted about all the things that will be possible to be done soon. So if they are true, technically this would seem just beyond grasp. I think there are certainly many people who would like to see this happening if it was possible. Thinking of all the vegans out there...

If significantly transhuman intelligence comes into play, you are about to lose the game, because intelligence is literally the key to doing everything else. If any sort of bootstrapping or feedback-loop intelligence appears on the scene, you might as well bow down and start worshipping. There's not a lot else you can do, and nothing you could do would matter.

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... which just makes clear that some people just did not get any of the messages from Avatar that the natural world and the culture of indigenous peoples have a value of their own and that it is not all just about utilitarianism and efficiency.

But how do we decide what culture is valuable, and which is not?

And don't say that all culture is equally valuable; it's clearly not. If it were, you'd positively support assimilating all the natives in the world into the 21st century hivemind. After all, the cultural and artistic output via the Internet is vastly larger, both in absolute terms and in proportion, than any other culture in history, perhaps by orders of magnitude.

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Originally Posted by Human No More

At the risk of misunderstanding him as I have before, I think Clarke was pointing out the flaw in your reasoning - that they want to change Earth as part of preserving it rather than simply replacing it, which doesn't actually seem to be the case, and as such, they should be given no more credence than flat-earthers or the 'zeitgeist' group.

I was trying to prompt a justification of why nature as it stands is automatically better than some other hypothetical nature-like construct. The apparent implicit one is, "Because it's traditional", but that would be fallacious, and so I'm sure it's not the one aurora is using.